ween the fields. I looked at my watch and began to time myself. The
moon was new and stood high in the western sky; the sun was sinking on
the downward stretch. It was a pleasant, warm fall day, and it promised
an evening such as I had wished for on my first drive out. Not a cloud
showed anywhere. I did not urge the horse; he made the first mile in
seven, and a half minutes, and I counted that good enough.

Then came the turn to the west; this new road was a correction line, and
I had to follow it for half a mile. There was no farmhouse on this short
bend. Then north for five miles. The road was as level as a table top--a
good, smooth, hard-beaten, age-mellowed prairie-grade. The land to east
and west was also level; binders were going and whirring their harvest
song. Nobody could have felt more contented than I did. There were two
clusters of buildings--substantial buildings--set far back from the
road, one east, the other one west, both clusters huddled homelike
and sheltered in bluffs of planted cottonwoods, straight rows of them,
three, four trees deep. My horse kept trotting leisurely along, the
wheels kept turning, a meadow lark called in a desultory way from a
nearby fence post. I was "on the go." I had torn up my roots, as it
were, I felt detached and free; and if both these prosperous looking
farms had been my property--I believe, that moment a "Thank-you" would
have bought them from me if parting from them had been the price of the
liberty to proceed. But, of course, neither one of them ever could have
been my property, for neither by temperament nor by profession had I
ever been given to the accumulation of the wealth of this world.

A mile or so farther on there stood another group of farm
buildings--this one close to the road. An unpainted barn, a long and
low, rather ramshackle structure with sagging slidedoors that could no
longer be closed, stood in the rear of the farm yard. The dwelling
in front of it was a tall, boxlike two-story house, well painted in a
rather loud green with white door and window frames. The door in front,
one window beside it, two windows above, geometrically correct, and
stiff and cold. The house was the only green thing around, however.
Not a tree, not a shrub, not even a kitchen garden that I could see.
I looked the place over critically, while I drove by. Somehow I was
convinced that a bachelor owned it--a man who made this house--which
was much too large for him--his "bunk." T